UCCS has secured a 1.25 Million AFOSR equipment grant to furnish a data center quality server room and an innovation security lab to foster development of educational and research programs in Cyber Security, Physical Security, and Homeland Security. They will be located in the new 150,000 square feet Science and Engineering Building to be completed April 2009. The innovation security server room will host three racks of blade servers with storage area network and 40 tera bytes of storage. It will be used for
Equipment/Software Systems being planned (not finalized) |
| a. Blade Server Racks and Server Module |
| HP C7000/C3000x2 chasis |
| 12 HP Blade 460C G6 Server Modules including 2 Intel Xeon E5530 (2.66GHz) Quad Core processors with 32 GB Memory |
| b. Storage Area Networks and 40 Tera Byte Storage |
HP EVA Storage & Lefthand SAN with 40 Tera byte storage per system |
| c. System Software for managing the virtual machines on blade servers |
VMWare Infrastructure with Lab Management software Lab Manager |
VMWare Infrastructure for 12 CPUs and 4 year support contract |
| d. Cyber Security Software Tools |
Nessus Annual Direct and Professional Feed |
IDA Pro Advanced Decompiler (1 Computer License) |
| Hex-Rays Disassembler $2300 |
| e. Network Router/Switch/Security Equipment |
Cisco router/switch/IDS/Firewalll |
The 620 square feet innovation security lab will be equipped with high end workstation, tablet/laptop PCs, and wireless/sensor network equipment and development kits. It has Audio/Video connection to the innovation lab, the large conference room and the teleconference room of the National Institute of Science, Space, and Security Centers (NISSSC) with high speed internet connection to Internet for conducting cyber or homeland security exercises.
Justification for Server Rack and Server Modules
We need three server racks for disaster recovery, system restoration/survivability, multi-tier server cluster, Internetworking research. It allows us to emulate how to reroute system traffic to the backup site, when one site fails, and to restore the original systems. It also allows us to investigate the design efficient secure storage network and secure collective network defense to allow network systems to function even when it is under attack. Each rack contains 4 high end X6250 blade server module each has dual quad core Xeon processor with 32 Giga byte main memory. Each of these high end blade server module allows us to run concurrent processes for demanding security related processing, or to run multiple networked virtual machines for cyber war exercises and different security research projects that requirement different system and application software configurations.
Justification for Storage Area Network
The storage area network with the provide Tera byte storage enables us to save large amounts of data expected to be generated by the proposed cyber security and homeland security research projects. The equipment also allows for virtual machines to access their file system images, and to access the existing cyber security knowledge base.
Justification for System software for managing the virtual machines on blade servers
To manage the large collections of virtual machines and servers for different security projects and to ensure the network configurations are properly configured, we need the VMWare Infrastructure with Lab Management software and related support.
Justification for cyber security software tool
We need this collection of security software tools to analyze the vulnerabilities in software server system.
Justification for the research equipment in the Innovation Security lab
The Cisco router/switch connects the blade server system, the PCs in the innovation lab and the campus network backbone. IDS and Firewall are needed to isolate and protect the networks. The workstations, desktops, laptops, all-in-one office machine, and wireless/sensor network equipment will be used by the researchers and students participated in security research and cyber war exercises.